Russians lose over $150 million in stolen crypto in single year

Russian residents have lost a staggering amount of money to crypto theft in a year, according to a study conducted by cybersecurity experts in the country. Russia’s share of the global cryptocurrency losses in 2024, although difficult to accurately estimate, exceeds $150 million, the authors say.

Last year saw hundreds of successful hacking attempts on platforms providing crypto-related services around the world, they noted, while the largest cryptocurrency heist in history took place in February 2025 when some $1.5 billion in digital assets were stolen by hackers.

Russian crypto victims lost billions of rubles to hackers

A company specializing in digital asset security has done its best to gauge the losses incurred by Russian crypto holders as a result of hacking attacks last year. And the numbers are impressive, the Russian business news portal RBC wrote in a post on its crypto page.

The total financial damage inflicted on Russian users by crypto thieves in 2024 has been estimated at over $150 million, or between 12.7 and 15 billion Russian rubles at the current exchange rate, the report revealed, quoting Shard, a Russia-based firm conducting risk assessment for digital assets.

In 2024, hackers carried out more than 160 major attacks on cryptocurrency platforms around the world, the Russian company’s Director of Investigations Grigory Osipov told RBC. The losses exceeded $2.16 billion, he detailed.

To estimate the size of the damages for Russian citizens, Shard’s analysts based their calculations on Russia’s share of the global crypto market, which is around 7%. “Assessing the damage from thefts in the crypto space is extremely difficult,” Osipov explained.

Less than a third of IT crimes get reported to the state

Only about 30% of the victims of IT crimes have reported these incidents to law enforcement authorities in 2024, Osipov pointed out, referring to data released earlier by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation.

The crypto security expert also highlighted the global nature of digital assets, noting that an attack could be carried out outside Russian jurisdiction but still affect Russian residents.

Furthermore, Russia does not maintain official statistics on crypto theft in particular, which means that Russian media reports rely mainly on information sourced from studies conducted abroad, Grigory Osipov elaborated.

Russian studies are often based on analysis of the judicial practice, but the number of criminal cases is still relatively small, RBC Crypto remarked. Less than 2,000 court decisions related to the theft of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) have been published so far.

That’s the reason why the company collects its data independently, including by tracking hacks and thefts through open sources, using platforms like ZachXBT, CryptoShields, and Chainabuse, responding to user requests, and conducting its own on-chain analysis.

Over $3 billion lost to hacks, fraud, and scams in 2024

Losses from hacks, fraud, and scams amounted to over $3.01 billion in 2024, according to the analysts at the blockchain security company PeckShield, compared to $2.61 billion in 2023, and the record-holding 2022, when they were around $3.6 billion.

More than 70% of the losses last year, or $2.15 billion, came from hacker attacks and security breaches, while the other nearly 30%, or $834.5 million, resulted from fraud. So far, approximately $488.5 million has been recovered.

In February 2025, the crypto space witnessed its largest crypto hack to date when hackers stole around $1.5 billion from a wallet controlled by one of the leading cryptocurrency exchanges, Bybit. North Korean hackers have been blamed for the hit on the Dubai-based trading platform.

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